Tuesday, 21 July 2015

Have you ever been puzzled as to why one of your emails received a higher open rate than expected? Let me start off by saying you're not the only one. Most of the time we will consider a number of causes; was the subject line more enticing? Maybe it was the time that it was sent out? Or was it the preview pane in Outlook that helped to entice subscribers?

All of these are valid reasons so you may think that all you can do is look at the reports and speculate the reasons but that's not true. A/B testing can help you to pinpoint what works and more importantly what doesn't.

What is A/B Testing and why is it useful?

A/B testing allows you to experiment with different subject lines, or even email designs, to increase the open rate and click-through rate of your email campaigns with a simple click of a button.

Within GraphicMail you can test up to eight subject lines or newsletters in a single A/B test, and it is as simple as deciding which newsletters or subject lines you wish to test, and then selecting which percentage of your mailing list you would like the test to be performed on.

Testing two subject lines against 10% of the mailing list.

After the A/B test has is complete, the ‘winning’ subject line or email design will be sent out to the remaining percentage of your list, it’s that simple!

This isn’t something that you should only do once either, A/B testing should be an integral part of your marketing strategy as it will allow you to pick up on subscriber trends over time, improve the interaction with your emails and make sure that all of your hard work isn’t going to waste.

Examples of what you can test

Okay so now you know all about A/B testing and how it can be a fundamental part of your email marketing, here's some ideas of what you can test within the subject line and email design.

Subject line
1. Try asking a question in the subject line.
2. Add personalisation.
3. Shorten the subject line with keywords at the front.

Another well deserved mention for A/B testing is to test your email pre-header (also known as snippet text). This will display in most email clients and give you the ability to have text displayed next to your subject line which can be used to entice your subscriber to open it.

Pre-header text is shown as grey font in the screenshot above, "send up to..."

Wednesday, 15 July 2015

Email Marketing Overview

Why is email marketing so important?

Email marketing is much more than just sending out a quick email. It is an easy, inexpensive and effective way to reach a large number of your consumers within minutes. No matter the size of your business, email marketing is a vital marketing tactic as many have voted as 'most effective type of digital marketing and the least difficult to execute' (survey completed by Ascend2).

What are the benefits of Email Marketing?

Customer Retention
It is obviously extremely important to make sure you don’t lose customers. Email marketing is a great way to keep in touch with your customers to let them know your still in business. There are many different types of emails that you can send, ranging from invitations and limited offers to company updates and after sales emails. All of these will help to keep in contact with your customers to ensure your brand is still something they will continually recognise.

Improve Customer Relations
An inbox can be a place of excitement as you can lighten up someone's day with a simple invite, exclusive offer or a bargain they will actually be interested in. It's vital that you know your audience and once you know their preferences, whether that be the type of email client they use, products they're interested in or simply their location you can then create a targeted email just for them. Using our segmentation tool together with personalisation means that you can make a huge difference with very little effort to ensure your subscribers are receiving emails which are relevant to them.

Increase Sales
Email is well known for being one of the most cost effective marketing tools with one of the best ROI. Even if you have a small budget, email marketing can still help you achieve those all-important sales, and when sending personalised emails to targeted lists you immediately increase your chances of a sale. When you combine that with A/B testing to ensure you are using the most effective subject line your open rates will increase and therefore your potential sales will do so too.

Why use an Email Service Provider?

If you want to send out nice, professional looking emails and don’t want to have to worry about coding it (or learning how to code!) then using an Email Service Provider is important, as well as many other reasons.

Email design
Select from a wide catalogue of ready-made fully responsive templates, which will looks great no matter which device it is viewed on, whether it’s a tablet, mobile or desktop.

It is incredibly simple to customise your chosen template using the drag-and-drop editor included within the ESP which means that you can add your company’s own brand identity with ease, and insert your content and images at the click of a button.

Creating great looking emails could not be easier using an ESP as all of the hard work has already been done for you, all you really have to do is add your own content to the template and you’re ready to send it out to your consumers.

List management
One of the main reason why you should be using an Email Service Provider is that your mailing list will be managed automatically. Therefore if one of your subscribers decides that they want to opt out of your newsletter, rather than having to manually remove them from your mailing list, all they have to do is click a link within the email and they will be removed automatically.

It really is that simple.

You can even place a subscription form on your website or Facebook page which can also be created with an ESP. This process is also completely managed as any of your visitors that sign up to your newsletter using these forms will be automatically added to your mailing list, meaning you never have to go through the painstaking process of adding them to the list yourself.

Delivery
If you are constantly sending your emails in bulk from your Gmail, Yahoo or even Outlook accounts there is a high likelihood that your emails will begin to get rejected by your recipients email servers, or your email address may even be shut down by your free email provider as it is probable that it will look like you are spamming.

Whereas Email Service Providers are highly trusted by the major ISPs which will mean that your emails will get delivered as intended. As you will be using their powerful servers, your newsletter will be delivered into your subscribers inbox in no time at all.

Statistics
In any form of marketing it is important that you know how effective your campaign has been and therefore statistics are crucial. Sending to your subscribers through your Hotmail or Gmail account means that you don’t even know if it has been delivered, never mind the depth of analytics that an ESP provides.

Within the reports and statistics of an ESP you can find out which emails have been opened, how many times a specific link has been clicked within your email, if they have shared it and even whether they have viewed your newsletter in Gmail, Outlook or on their iPhone.

Knowing this type of information about your subscribers will help you to make changes to future email campaigns helping to achieve the best possible results. An example of this is, if most of your subscribers are opening your email on a mobile then you can make it more user-friendly by using buttons rather than hyperlinked text.

Free to try
The vast majority of Email Service Providers offer a no-obligation free trial which you can sign up to in order to try out the platform before you make the decision to sign up. For a limited period, these trials give you all of the advanced features of the paid account so why not make use of it and see what it’s all about?

Thursday, 9 July 2015

Your hard work and determination has paid off as you've created the perfect newsletter, excellent! Now comes an extremely important step before you’re ready to send; testing.

There are so many different email clients available to your subscribers these days and they all will potentially display your beautifully created newsletter in different, possibly design-breaking ways. This is why the testing phase of your email campaign is truly essential and it is imperative that you do not overlook this step.

So how can we test your newsletter within GraphicMail to make sure that it is getting received in the manner that you intended?

Preview

The first step to take would be to use the Preview section within the account, this will let you see the personalisation exactly as your subscribers will see it when it arrives in their inbox.

Simply select your newsletter and your mailing list and cycle through some of the contacts to make sure that it’s all looking great!

Email before the personalisation is populated.

Email within the Preview section showing the personalisation.

Send a Test

The next logical step would be to send a test (or a few tests) from within your account. Sending a test of the newsletter will not only give you another chance to see the personalisation in action but it will also allow you to make sure that the email is displaying correctly in the inbox.

Newsletter in the inbox.
We would recommend that you send your tests to a few different email addresses, preferably using an array of different email clients; Outlook, Gmail, iPhone, and any others that you want to test. This will enable you to make sure that it looks just as expected across all of these different platforms.

This is incredibly good practice and is a great habit to get into as it means that you’ll be able to see what the email displays like on real devices and see exactly what your subscribers will see before you do decide to send your newsletter.

Inbox Preview

Using the Inbox Preview tool, you can view what your newsletter will look like in over 30 different email clients, simply at the click of a button.

The Inbox Preview is completely free to use and is an exceptional way to preview exactly how your newsletter will display on the different email clients your subscribers could use ranging from desktop, mobile and web clients.

Here’s just a handful of the email clients tested within our Inbox Preview
It will take less than five minutes to populate from start to finish, and once it has you can then view the full email from any of the preview panes and note the changes that you may have to make in order to get it to display as designed across the board.

Note: all email clients render the newsletters in different ways and it will never look exactly the same, but using the Inbox Preview will save you time and help you to take steps to get as close as possible.

You’re Ready To Send

Once you have completed the three steps above, made any changes that you needed to make (if any), and you’re happy with how your newsletter is displaying across all of the platforms you have tested it on then you’re ready to send it out to your subscribers!

Using one of the 80+ free responsive templates available to all GraphicMail users will ensure that your newsletter will look great on any device, and they are therefore a great base to build your newsletter on. To try out any of our free responsive templates, sign up for a free no-obligation trial at; http://graphicmail.co.uk/get-your-free-trial.

The newsletter used in the screenshots of this blog are from our video tutorial which shows you how easy it is to create a fully responsive email in under 10 minutes using GraphicMail, and you can view that video on YouTube here.

Tuesday, 7 July 2015

We understand the importance of keeping your account safe which is why we have now introduced a new 2-Factor Authentication process when logging into your account. Although it is not vital for you to use this new feature, we would strongly recommend it as it will help to strengthen the security of your account.

There are 2 options when using the new authentication process:

Option 1 is email which will send a verification PIN code to the email address related to your account (username).Option 2 is SMS which will use the mobile number assigned to your user profile and send a text message to you displaying the verification PIN code.

Once you have the PIN code, simply enter it into the textbox to finalise your login:

If turned on within the settings of your account, you will not be required to 2-factor authenticate every time you log in. You will only be required to authenticate once every 30 days or when you use a new browser/device to access your GraphicMail account.

Please note: The 2-factor authentication process will not use any of your mobile or
email send credits as the verification messages will be sent free of charge. If
you'd like to turn it on then follow these steps:

Setup & Options (tab on the left) >> Security Settings and then select how you would prefer the verification PIN to be sent to you; once selected, click save.

Tuesday, 16 June 2015

It's no surprise that when talking about personalisation in an email, it often makes people think of populating the first name within an email. However what's commonly missed, is that personalisation isn't just a case of 'populating a first name' as it's a lot more powerful than that.

If used correctly, personalisation can create a more personal connection with the recipient, ensure the email content is specifically targeted for them while simplifying the whole process of targeting your subscribers as you'll only be using one email.

Now we've covered what it's used for, let us show you exactly how it works...

Personalise Your Subjectline

You can insert personalisation into the subject line which will help to attract the subscriber's attention. You can also use our A/B testing tool which will allow you to test different subject lines to see which one generates the best open rate.

Personalise Your Email

Now for the more advanced side of personalisation. We can insert it into the body of an email as personalised text and images, yeah that's right I said images. By adding personalisation to your email, you are instantly making it more relevant to the recipient, resulting in a better user experience and increase the likelihood of interaction with your email.

As well as personalisation helping to keep the email relevant, it also helps to simplify the process of targeting each of your subscribers. As the information is going to automatically change for each recipient, it means you can use the one email to send to thousands of customers with each customer reading valuable content related to them.

Personalising Text and Images...

An example we've created is for an Italian Restaurant. This company has 3 restaurants in different locations so we're going to use one email but have the content & images change using the information we have stored for each subscriber.

The personalisation fields being inserted are going to cover client data, booking information & restaurant details. We're also going to be inserting two personalised images which will make it clear which restaurant each customer has booked a meal at.

The screenshot below shows the email with all of the personalisation fields that have been added as well as the images. The reason the top 'banner image' and bottom 'map image' are not displaying correctly is because they will only display once the image path is complete. This is done using personalisation as it will insert the final image path such as 'newcastle_header.png'.

Once sent, the personalisation fields in the email will populate relating to that specific subscriber's details. The animation below shows how a recipient related to each restaurant would receive it:

If you'd like to see a more in-depth step by step guide detailing how to personalise your email with text & images then please view this help file.

If you have some ideas of your own but aren't sure how / if they can work then contact our support team as they'd be glad to discuss your ideas with you. Call them on 0191 5004 114 or via live chat available here.

Friday, 5 June 2015

What better way to show you how easy our editor is to use than creating a responsive email in under 10 minutes. That's right, all we need is 8 minutes and 54 seconds of your time and we'll explain everything you need to know about creating a responsive email within our editor.

Our editor has over 80 responsive templates for you to start with, so you don't need to begin with a very basic one as shown in this video tutorial.

As shown in the video, our editor is very easily to use and comes with lots of advanced tools:

• Add, move and delete content blocks within your email
• Include new layouts via the HTML view (different layouts are provided within this help file).
• Easily amend the content & styling of the email
• Insert personalisation into the email so it states Dear 'Firstname' or similar.
• Hyperlink text & images to web pages or simply include subscription links such as forward to a friend, subscribe, view in browser and unsubscribe.
• Insert your own images and have them imported into your GraphicMail account or host them externally.
• Link directly to videos on YouTube & Vimeo. When linking to videos, our editor will take a screenshot of the video, include a play button & hyperlink it correctly for you.
• Insert social icons which will either link to your own Facebook, Twitter and other accounts or allow the recipient to share your newsletter themselves.
• Send a test while editing the email, allowing you to make sure it displays correctly within your email client.
• Preview how your email looks on a desktop, iPad and iPhone.

If you'd like to try our editor as well as have access to over 80 free responsive templates then either loginor signup for a free no obligation free trial:

Friday, 29 May 2015

Our new editor provides over 80 responsive templates to make sure you have everything you need to create your email with ease. The templates are placed into categories based on their industry and layout which makes it even easier for you to find a templates that fits your requirements.

Our Template Team have now introduced two new categories into the template library. The first of the categories that they have introduced is ‘Ecommerce’, within that category you will see existing templates with a mix of layouts and an additional new template which has been added:

The second category that our Template Team have introduced is ‘Newsletter’, which groups numerous existing templates and a new additional template shown below:

As with all of our templates, you can completely customise them to fit with your brand. The latest editor makes it very easy for you to add new content, easily style the email & even personalise it. As well as a host of other features, the editor comes with its own Image Editor allowing you to also make changes to your images too. If you’d like to see the email & image editor in action then please view our video demonstration.

We will continue to update our template library to make sure we add and improve the templates that are made available to you.

Want to try our responsive templates? Signup to a free no obligation trial to gain full access to them.